Introducing EdgeX Foundry

The vendor-neutral EdgeX Foundry Project has been launched under the Linux Foundation. The initiative is aligned around a common goal: the simplification and standardization of the foundation for edge computing architectures in the Industrial IoT market, while still allowing the ecosystem to add significant value. The seed for the new project is a fully-functional, Alpha-grade edge platform based on over 125,000 lines of code donated by Dell with references to other open source projects and developed with feedback from their partners, customers, and even competitors. The EdgeX project has already garnered a diverse and experienced membership base of supporting companies that is continuing the development of the architecture and code base.

Key tenets for the EdgeX Foundry Project include:

- Provide a flexible microservices architecture that can support the use of any combination of heterogeneous ingredients plugged into a common interoperability foundation

- Support best-in-class industrial-grade security, manageability, performance, and reliability while still maintaining extensibility

- Support drop-in replacements of microservices or entire subsections with more performant versions without requiring architectural changes (e.g., enabling a developer to replace a Java-based microservice with one written in Go Lang while not having to replace the entire solution)

- Allow for additional community improvements that enable performance metrics (e.g., to support hard real-time operation)